Arseholes List

You might be included thereon. It’s not easy to be so. You have to be a real c**t.

I make allowances for anyone in their dippy 20s. And sometimes – for blokes especially (who wear metaphorical nappies for decades) – I’ll go up to about 39.

But if you’ve hit 40 and you’re still behaving like a twat, you’re on it.

You can have been pissing me off years with yawnsome self-absorption, or an inability to turn up on time to anything.

You can have got all passive-aggressive with me in a work situation.

You can have blocked, obfuscated, undermined and smoke-screened your way through a professional project partnership with me, to mask your own insecurities and the fact that you are absolutely shit at your job.

It can be something as simple as undertaking me at a traffic light, answering a personal mobile call when you are interviewing me for a job, or calling someone ‘coloured’ (I mean, sheesh, really).

But if you’re a grown adult and you fuck with me or mine in some way, you’re gonna find yourself on that list.

It’s an invisible list. It’s not carved in stone, but (elephant-like) I never, ever forget.

For example, a mother at my kids’ school once complained that my 9-year-old was a bully – he’s not, her kid’s a fat, menacing brat, in fact.

With my best Cath Kidston face, I attended all the right meetings, said all the right stuff and made her look like a total div. But that was just an appetiser.

A few months later, she applied to my workplace for a keep-me-busy, low-paid, admin-type role. She made the huge error of asking my advice and alerting me to her incoming application.

I accessed her file. I changed her referee’s contact details to an email account I set up. I put in several good words for her with the interview panel. I coached her through the interview scenario. I encouraged her to burn her bridges and resign from her old job, once she had the new (conditional) job offer.

Then, I faked an excoriating reference – which detailed her penchant for dogging and a coprophiliac incident at the staff Christmas party. The offer of employment was withdrawn and I had the pleasure of watching her sink into a morass of two-stone-heavier, unemployed misery, with only her horrible lump of a whinging son to get her through the dark days.

And that’s what I mean about an arseholes list. Putting someone on it provides instant relief from wanting to throw dog-shit at them and sets an undetermined date for righteous vengeance served at a very cold temperature indeed.